Photoblog Friday: 08-19-2005

0Josh • 19th Aug 2005 • blog entries, nome., photoblog, station life

Its less than two weeks until we pack up and move from Nome, but things aren’t slowing down at all!

On Wednesday morning we had a pretty devastating fire here at KICY, as you can see in the photo above, one of the buildings at our transmitter site almost burned to the ground. The building up until a month ago housed our main transmitter, but at the time of the fire simply had tuning coils that were part of the main broadcasting tower operation. We have been knocked off the air during the day but hope to be back at a lower power within a few days, but our overnight “beam directly into Russia” broadcasts probably won’t be back online until a year from now.

At 7:20 or so Lon was hosting the breakfast club and right in the middle of one of my pre-recorded sports reports he noticed the audio getting choppy. Thinking it was probably just a computer problem, he put in a CD…but the same problem was still there. About 5 minutes after that KICY AM went completely off the air. Lon came into our studio and told us the problem he was having and we concluded power must have been lost at our transmission site 3 miles out of town. We have a computer system that dials the site and can tell us how much power we are broadcasting at, if the tower lights are on, etc… We connected to this system just fine, and that told us that power was still on, the problem was something else.

Dennis had come in a bit early Wednesday morning and was at the station when the problem started to occur. Lon relayed the message to Dennis that we couldn’t figure out why we went off the air and Dennis drove out to the site. When he got there he was greeted with flames shooting out the roof of the tuning building.

It looks like it will be a week or so until we can get back on, and luckily it looks like insurance will cover even costs to get us on the air even temporarily. Keep KICY and our listeners in your prayers as we figure out what steps to take next.

You can see additional pictures of the fire damage – (click here)